


Into Grass Overgrown, Fall Down

by thecryoftheseagulls



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Emotional Intimacy, Galran Culture (Voltron), Healing, M/M, Mutual Pining, Nerding Out About Space, No Season 8, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, Sunsets, Therapy, they're in love Harold (but neither of them has that figured out yet)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:47:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29770194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecryoftheseagulls/pseuds/thecryoftheseagulls
Summary: Shiro has been doing his part in the reconstruction efforts as the captain of the Atlas. He's been going to his Garrison-required therapy appointments. He's doing everything he should be doing, really. So why does he still feel stuck?Or, a few years after the war, Shiro and Keith decide to run away to space together.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 51
Collections: Sheithlentines 2021





	Into Grass Overgrown, Fall Down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EsorValia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EsorValia/gifts).



> This is my 2021 sheithlentines gift for Esorvalia. Your wishlist was so good! Absolutely chockful of things I love. I tried to hit a few all at once: mutual pining, essentially married but they don't know that yet, emotional intimacy/devotion, healing from the war physically and emotionally, Keith’s quintessence sensitivity, bonding with Krolia, and traveling the stars along with Kosmo. Some of these appear a little offscreen, but I hope I incorporated them in a way that you'll enjoy ☺️

> After every war  
>  someone has to clean up.  
>  Things won’t  
>  straighten themselves up, after all.
> 
> Someone has to push the rubble  
>  to the side of the road,  
>  so the corpse-filled wagons  
>  can pass.
> 
> -Wisława Szymborska, [”The End and the Beginning”](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52955/the-end-and-the-beginning)

They’ve been working through Shiro’s feelings about mortality for a while now.

“You’ve had a shortened time horizon for a long time,” his Garrison-assigned therapist, Jill, says, leaning forward in the armchair across from Shiro. Her chair is upholstered in old brown leather, worn and creased, but still somehow warm and welcoming. 

The armchair Shiro’s sitting in does not match, clearly having been reupholstered sometime since the war. Shiro looks down at the navy and white stripes of fabric on the armrest, which you think would clash with the bumblebee print under his ass, but they go together somehow. There’s a metaphor there about patching things up with what you have on hand, Shiro has thought before.

“It’s a coping mechanism that all of my patients developed during the war,” Jill continues. “But you’ve been in survival mode since Kerberos, and, in some ways, before that. I think when the war ended, your brain still saw all the work that was needed in reconstruction, and said ‘we can’t relax yet, this isn’t over’.”

Shiro resists the urge to pick at a bit of loose blue thread on the end of the armrest.

“That sounds… about right,” he says, giving an awkward little laugh. He flattens his hand over the curve of the armrest instead. “I know that it’s not my responsibility to fix the entire universe after the dissolution of a 10,000 year old empire? But also it kind of feels like it’s my responsibility.”

Jill glances at the analog clock on her wall. Shiro takes that as permission to look too, and registers the ten minutes left in his hour before Jill focuses on him again, intent and sincere.

“You’re doing fantastic work as captain of the Atlas, Shiro,” she says. “That’s definitely true. But the quality of the work you’re doing, and even the importance of that work, now, for the peace efforts… doesn’t mean that you are the only person who can _be_ Atlas’s captain.”

Shiro swallows and nods, cautiously. It’s taken a while for him to realize that she’s right about this, about his ship. He may have been the first person able to unlock Atlas's ability to transform, but that was because of the Altean crystal that powered his last prosthetic. When the lack of an elbow had really started to make the pain in his arm worse, all the time, because his brain kept thinking his arm was gone again, he'd gotten a new prosthetic that was solid all the way down but fully detachable, and the crystal went back to Allura. But Atlas still responded to him, and she’d even begun to build fledgling mental bonds with most of the crew, as long as they’d been stationed aboardship for a few months. They were pretty sure that anyone with a bond with the Atlas could captain her in an emergency, and at Jill’s suggestion, they tested that theory a few weeks ago and had different members of the bridge team take the helm. Atlas had flown for all of them.

Shiro hadn’t quite realized how _trapped_ he had felt, as Atlas’s captain, until he knew for sure that she would fly for someone else.

“Can you do something for me, this week?” Jill asks, regarding him with a patient expression. “I want you to think about what you really _want_ to be doing. Think about the future, beyond just Atlas’s next few missions. What can you imagine yourself doing? Could be long-term career ideas, or temporary assignments, or even just something you want to plan for your next bit of shore leave.”

“Are you trying to get me to quit my job, Jill, or just take a vacation?” Shiro jokes, rubbing a knuckle into the corner of his eye. 

Jill taps the pen in her hand against her mouth and says, “I am... at the bare minimum, asking you to think about whether you might want a vacation or a career change.” She sits forward, on the edge of her chair, which Shiro has learned means she’s about to say something he might find hard to hear but ultimately will be really helpful, and says, “You’ve got a long, long life ahead of you, for the first time since you were diagnosed as a child. And that’s a major perspective shift, Shiro. I think the first question you really need to ask yourself is ‘what do I want?’”

“‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Shiro quotes.

Jill gives him a soft, full smile.

“The life you have left is just as precious as it was when you first put that poem up on your wall in the Garrison as a teenager.”

“Ugh, _Jill_ ,” Shiro says, and she slides the box of tissues on the table between them closer to his side, and reaches out to pat him on the shoulder.

****

Afterwards, Shiro steps out from the sterile air-conditioned chill of Jill’s office, and into the desert heat. He has an hour to kill before he’s supposed to meet up with Keith for dinner, but there’s a buzzy sort of restlessness in his head, and he can’t stomach the idea of going back to his office on the Atlas, passing all the people under his command, making small talk with them.

He pulls out his communicator to text Keith.

_Dinner out by the cliffs tonight?_

He starts heading for his hoverbike while he waits for Keith to respond. It only takes a couple of minutes, despite the fact that Keith is supposed to be in a meeting right now.

_Sure. I’ll grab something for us to eat after we’re done here and meet you there._

Shiro exhales a breath, glad for the excuse not to have to figure out their dinner.

_Thanks, Keith._

He opens the compartment behind his bike’s seat and shrugs into his leather jacket, his gloves, his goggles, and his helmet. He’ll just… he’ll just ride, for a while, until Keith is free.

It is a relief, really, to straddle the bike and zip out towards the canyon, kicking up a cloud of sand behind him as he goes. A quiet pleasure, the handlebars in his grip and the rumble of the engine between his thighs, something he can control, something familiar. Shiro guns it as soon as he’s far enough away from the buildings and the main road for it to be safe, as if he’s 21 again, riding out of the Garrison on a free evening and feeling both incredibly invincible and incredibly mortal, his death like a mountain ahead of him that loomed closer every day, and by god, he would grab this reminder that he was alive and strong while he had it.

“Fuck,” he mutters, the word snatched from his mouth by the wind and replaced with the grit of sand behind his teeth, as his vision blurs. _Again_ with the tears. He inches off the gas, slows, and parks at the base of the shale and sandstone butte that dominates the skyline in this area. When he’s stopped, Shiro peels off his goggles and tugs them up over his helmet so he can wipe his eyes again. He slides off the bike and drops down to sit on one of the boulders in the butte’s shadow.

What does he _want_ , huh? Like it’s so easy to stare down a future so much longer than he ever dreamed his future could be. 

How does anyone look at all those decades head-on and take responsibility for how to fill them?

Shiro has taken responsibility for a lot of things in his life. He took responsibility for managing his disease at a very young age. He made annual updates to his will, from the age of about 15. He took personal responsibility for his dream of piloting and for the steps it took to get him there. He stepped up to lead a motley group of teenagers in their fight against an intergalactic empire when all he had on the team was a few years of training and a couple of extra traumas. He took command of the Atlas when she first woke up. He’s a goddamn professional at stepping up when the situation demands it, taking responsibility for the tasks right in front of him. 

But for asking himself what he wants _beyond_ the next step? 

Not so much.

Maybe if he thinks about what he wanted when he was a kid? 

It’s hard to reach back that far -- he’s wanted to be a pilot, for so much of his life. But he thinks of the films he liked as a kid, the ones that tugged at him somehow. Always a boy, on the edge of his small town, watching the sun go down and dreaming of bigger things, dreaming of _escape_. That was the picture he held in his mind's eye when he decided he wanted to go to space.

Then all the doctors and Adam and Admiral Sanda and everyone else started telling him to lower his expectations, and what he wanted had shifted to _prove them all wrong_. Now… he's the captain of the Atlas, a former Paladin of Voltron… a war hero. He has nothing left to prove. 

But when he was younger... he was the kind of kid who watched the horizon at sunset and dreamed of far-off places. 

He could dream of that again. He could chase that horizon. Pick a star in the desert sky and make his way there. He needs no one's permission, not anymore.

It's just that he can no longer fathom chasing the stars on his own.

He touches the communicator zipped into his jacket pocket, pulls it out.

Keith: _Hope you like those weird little croissant sliders the commissary serves on Tuesdays cause options seem to be limited today._

Keith: _I’m taking your silence for assent. See you soon._

Shiro snorts and texts back.

_tbh I’ve always thought those looked a little questionable, but I’m happy to try them._

He puts the communicator away again, stands up, dusts himself off. He’d better get going, or Keith will beat him to their spot.

****

Keith arrives only a couple minutes after Shiro, which gives Shiro just enough time to pull off his biking gear and put it away like he's been here a while.

Keith kills his engine and hops off his hoverbike just next to where Shiro is leaning casually against his own bike. Rather than do the same, Kosmo warps out of the box seat Keith has built onto the back of his bike for him, and re-appears at Shiro’s side.

"Hey," Shiro says, not having to work to summon a smile for Keith even while his eyes feel gritty and the rest of him feels… a little stretched, a little ragged. He ruffles Kosmo between his ears.

"Hey yourself," Keith says, tugging off his helmet and pushing slightly damp hair off his face. He's wearing a red leather jacket, tight black jeans and tall boots. Shiro lets his eyes dip appreciatively down the lean, strong lines of Keith's body while Keith turns away to store his helmet and pull their dinner out of his saddlebags. It's basically a habit at this point to look his fill when Keith's not going to catch him.

“How was your meeting?” Shiro asks, as Keith throws down the rough old rug they usually sit on, close enough to the edge of the cliffs that they’ll have an unobstructed view of the sunset.

Keith glances at him, gaze sharp, and Shiro pauses. He hadn’t been crying _that_ much. His voice wasn’t hoarse, was it?

“Oh, fine.” Keith looks away as he sits down, and pats the rug beside him in invitation. He starts rummaging in the bag of commissary takeout. Shiro folds himself down onto the rug and Kosmo flops down in front of them both, his tail hanging off the rug and stirring up little puffs of dust as it thumps against the ground. “Just a bunch of reports from across the old empire. They’re doing some really cool cultural restoration projects on Deltor, and in the Zeb system, but that’s about it.”

Shiro hums. Keith passes him a sandwich, “veg” scrawled in black marker across the foil wrapping. Unwrapped, it’s egg and mystery-sausage inside a croissant. Or, well, inside a round croissant bun. It looks just as greasy as it does inside the commissary display case, especially given what he knows about the problems with the global food chain, but on a still-recovering planet, you can’t always be choosy about what you eat. Shiro takes a bite.

Keith, always less picky, is already halfway through his own sandwich. “Actually kinda tastes like sausage this time,” he says, his mouth full. “I got you the vegetarian one, though I personally can’t decide if mystery-plant-sausage is more suspicious than mystery-meat-sausage in These Times.”

The meat substitute, probably made mostly out of beans or lentils, is a little soggy and not _really_ sausage consistency, but Shiro says, “I’d take the plant option any day.”

“I thought you’d say that,” Keith says, watching him over his own sandwich with an expression so warm and familiar that Shiro ducks his head.

They’re both quiet for a while, as they eat.

“So how’s Jill?” Keith eventually asks, too casual. He always sees right through Shiro.

“Good, I guess?”

“Uh-huh,” Keith says, taking a long drink from a water bottle and then passing it over.

Shiro takes it, fiddling with the screw cap while he tries to decide if he wants to talk to Keith about this. He thinks he does. Keith knows him so well; if anyone can tell him what’s reasonable for Shiro to want to do with his future, it’s Keith, but… Shiro doesn’t know if he’s sorted through it all in his own head, yet.

“She gave me some homework this week,” Shiro says anyway, because not having sorted it all out is a great reason to talk it out with Keith, actually.

“Yeah?” Keith asks, turning to face Shiro more fully. He draws up one leg and drapes his arm around it, resting his cheek against his knee. This close, Shiro can see the way the waning sunlight casts little shadows across his face, highlighting the sharp point of his jaw and the elegant fall of his dark eyelashes against his cheek. 

Shiro sighs softly at the sight of him. 

Kosmo’s tail whaps against Shiro’s knee.

“We’ve been talking about the future, I guess?” Shiro says cautiously. “My future plans and dreams. And, um, how I haven’t really had this _much_ future to look forward to, ever?” Keith nods seriously. “So she wants me to take some time this week to -- sit with that, and think about what I really want. If I want something different than just Captain of the Atlas, now that we know for sure other people can captain her. Or even if I maybe just need a vacation to look forward to.”

“That makes sense,” Keith says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I mean, my therapist and I talked about that too, a couple months ago.”

Shiro doesn’t remember hearing about that, but they don’t always talk about their sessions. Shiro talks to Keith about his, when he wants a second opinion or when he’s got something he and Jill talked about worrying around in his brain that won’t go away. But when Keith has a hard session, he tends to go quiet instead of talk about it. Just curl up against Shiro’s side and stay there for the evening, if they’re not off on different assignments. It’s nice actually, because Shiro knows that it’s still hard for Keith to talk about the things he’s been through with people who aren’t Shiro. When they all got assigned to therapy, Keith worked his way through four different therapists before he’d finally found one that was a good fit. And still, even with this one, he still comes back to Shiro afterwards. Lets Shiro just be there for him when he’s used up all his words.

“It’s not _exactly_ the same for me as it is for you, I know,” Keith says, “but I think that asking ‘what do you want for your future now that the war is over’ is a standard part of the Garrison therapists’ post-war counseling. I mean, we’ve all got survivor’s guilt to work through, and the uncertainty of moving forward on a planet that’s been so changed by the war. And the war changed all of us, too -- we’re different people than we were before, and maybe we want different things. Especially the team, you know? Most of us were just teenagers before Voltron.” 

Keith shrugs, dropping one hand to pet idly through Kosmo’s fur.

“That’s true,” Shiro says. He hands the water bottle back to Keith. “Before the war -- before Kerberos, I always felt like I was racing against the clock that was my body, just trying to live out all my dreams before I _couldn’t_ any more.”

“Yeah. I remember,” Keith says softly.

“I think I’ve been avoiding thinking about it because I don’t really know what to do with myself now that I’m not gonna die before I’m, like, 35.”

“ _Shiro_ ,” Keith says, with the same intense denial he’s always treated the idea of Shiro’s death.

Shiro smiles for it, his eyes watering again. Kosmo whines, getting up and turning around in a circle only to lie down again with his head in Shiro’s lap.

“It’s okay, buddy,” Shiro tells the wolf, petting him and ignoreing how watery his voice is. “I’m gonna live to be so old now, you’ve got no idea. I’m gonna be one of those old flyboys, wandering around complaining about my creaky joints and the good old days.”

“This assumes that you haven’t _always_ been an old-timer,” Keith says, and he’s smiling too, although Shiro can see him wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Why must you insult me so in front of the child, Keith?” Shiro complains. 

Kosmo woofs.

Keith screws up his face at the both of them. “Okay, I take it back, you’re a big baby.”

“Keith-”

“A small child.”

“Um, excuse _me_ -”

“The tiniest babe. How old are you, like, 8?” Keith tsks, and Shiro cracks. He sways into Keith’s side, laughing. “You’re not even close to double digits, Shiro!”

“I swear I’m an adult!”

“Uh-huh,” Keith says, skeptical, even as his arm wraps around Shiro’s back to keep him upright. Shiro turns his face and muffles his laughter into Keith’s neck. He feels Keith’s fingers, a moment later, on the back of his neck, combing gently through the buzzed hair there. Keith’s chest vibrates with his own laughter. 

Shiro holds on to the back of Keith’s jacket, and wonders, even as his chuckles die down, how long he can responsibly stay like this, held close in Keith’s arms.

But before he can really contemplate moving back, Keith says, “Hey.”

“Hm?”

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you about.”

“Hit me,” Shiro says, resting his cheek against Keith’s shoulder and giving in to the urge to stay. Keith’s arm settles around his shoulders, and he feels, more than sees, Keith smile against his hair.

“So, my mom has been telling me about the reconstruction work she and Kolivan are doing, and it turns out there’s a lot of Galra culture that has just been neglected, if not outright lost. Zarkon was so focused on empire-building for so long that a lot of the,” Keith pauses and says a Galra word that Shiro doesn’t recognize, “were really ignored, or underfunded, in favor of militarization and armament efforts.”

Strange. Shiro is pretty fluent in Galra these days -- he’s been working on learning the language since the war ended, in an effort to support Keith while he’s been learning about his Galra heritage. Shiro had already picked up a lot of Galra when he was a captive, anyways.

“I don’t know that one,” Shiro says, and repeats the word back at Keith, pleased when his pronunciation comes out almost perfect.

“Oh, uh,” Keith scratches the back of his neck with the arm that’s not wrapped around Shiro. “It’s like, the cumulative cultural arts?” He frowns. “I think the closest English word would be ‘humanities,’ maybe.”

“Galrities. Hm. Galranities?” Shiro suggests. 

Keith snorts a laugh.

“ _Anyways_ , yeah, the Galranities, I guess. They’re a big mess.”

“That sucks,” Shiro says, burrowing down a little bit so that Keith’s hand is back on a level with his hair. Keith starts petting him again, almost absent-mindedly. “Makes sense though.”

“Yeah,” Keith agrees. “But it turns out the Blades were involved in squirreling away records and artifacts that they deemed culturally important and in danger of being lost to Zarkon’s regime, so Kolivan has been working on redistributing a lot of that information back to the relevant groups.. A while ago, he found a bunch of records from my mom’s clan, the Racheans, and she’s been super interested in all of that.”

Shiro hums to show that he’s still listening, and turns his gaze out towards the setting sun while Keith talks. It’s not quite to the horizon, but the clouds are starting to light up bright pink and orange.

“Did you know the Racheans were the first Galra clan to master spaceflight?” Keith asks, his voice taking on the same excitement he gets whenever he talks about any kind of astroexploration. “We’re talking like, _decades_ before any of the other Galra. And their ships were so cool, Shiro, they were legitimately sailing ships? They had engines with a limited supply of refined quintessence to get them through the atmosphere, and then from there they had these sails that unfurled to catch solar radiation and cosmic quintessence. Can you imagine? _Galra_ -built ships powered just by the quintessence that already exists in space, no extraction or planet-killing required.”

“And they worked?” Shiro asks.

“Yes! I mean, originally they weren’t capable of going much further than the closest planets in the solar system, and they tended to disintegrate on re-entry, but _then_ the Rachean pilots accidentally discovered a quintessence eddy, which allowed them to travel at faster than light speeds. It turns out the Balmera leave what are essentially quintessence currents behind them when they move, and the Racheans could dip in and out of those currents to travel farther and faster.”

“No need to actually harvest crystals from the Balmera?”

“Nope, like this was a super-sustainable method of space travel, before quintessence mining to the point of destruction was really a thing. Risky as hell, because these ships didn’t have any kind of backup engines, and their communication back home to Daibazaal was super shoddy, but the Racheans thought that it was worth the risk to find out what they could learn from the planets and systems around them.”

At this point, Keith has stopped petting Shiro and sat up straight so that he can gesture with his hands excitedly. Shiro glances at Kosmo, who is watching Keith with his big eyes and wagging his tail quietly. The clouds are darkening to deep purples as the sun dips below the horizon, and Shiro feels a familiar warmth in his chest as he watches Keith talk about something he loves, and trusting Shiro to listen and be excited too. And, honestly...

“That’s really cool, Keith,” Shiro says, giving this man he loves a smile he knows is hopelessly fond, and Keith, for once, seems to actually notice it, because he stops, dropping his hands into his lap, and staring intently at Shiro’s face.

“Shiro,” Keith says, with a determined glint in his eyes that Shiro recognizes from every time Keith has ever firmed up a decision to do something bold.

“Yeah, Keith?”

“They built one. My mom got me an offer to be one of the first Galra to do a tour on one of these ships in 10,000 years. Come with me?”

Shiro stares at him, speechless.

“It’s basically a two year tour, from the Rachean colony in the Pral system to neighboring Kiget, and Mom has this idea that I should embrace the Rachean coming of age tradition of like, going off away from home for a year or two,” Keith barrels ahead when Shiro doesn’t immediately answer, barely stopping for breath. “Which, I kind of think I’m past the age where that even makes sense, and also I kind of did that already? What else do you call the space whale, or Voltron in general, but _regardless_ this ship -- they’re calling it the Orozeni -- sounds like all the coolest parts of studying astroexploration at the Garrison, except in real life, and I already talked to the captain; she thinks my quintessence sensitivity will be helpful in navigating the quintessence currents they’re planning to use to get from Pral to Kiget, but I told her, and I told Mom -- I said, I’m not doing it if it means that I have to spend a full two years away from Shiro, and they said -- invite him. So. I’m inviting you.”

“Keith-”

“If you want an option where you quit your job and take some time to think about what you really want to be doing, um, you should -- you could. Run away with me to space for a while.”

“Yes,” Shiro says, before Keith can start talking again. “ _Yes_ , Keith, I absolutely do want to go on a cool alien space exploration mission with you. Are you kidding? This is a kind of vessel that no human has ever flown on before.”

Keith’s expression goes from relieved to smug, his dark eyes sparkling.

“Yeah, I thought that angle might spark your interest.”

Shiro flicks him on the ear.

“You know me too well,” he says, mock-mournful.

The first stars are coming out in the darkened sky, and Shiro glances up. He picks out Venus, bright and blinking, and avoids Keith’s eyes while he thinks about how to say what he wants to. 

“Listen,” he says. “I was thinking about space, before you got here, because that’s what I’ve always wanted and if the homework is to think about what I want…” he shrugs, watching the sky for a moment longer before he turns to Keith. “But what I don’t want, Keith, is any kind of mission, or job, or future, where you’re not by my side. I think we’ve both had enough of that to last us a lifetime.”

“I know,” Keith says softly.

“So. We could… start with the Orozeni, and then decide where we should go from there? Together?”

“You sure you want to step down from the Atlas?” Keith asks. “Jill literally just asked you to start considering your position as captain a couple weeks ago.”

Shiro picks at the balled up foil wrapper from his sandwich and thinks about it for a moment.

But only for a moment.

“The truth is, she just asked me to talk about something I’d already been feeling for a while. I love Atlas, she’s a great ship, but I don’t want to be the person in charge of Earth’s flagship forever. The feelings that I have as her captain, that I’m personally responsible for fixing all the problems of the war, on earth and the rest of the universe, just aren’t healthy.”

Keith squeezes his shoulder.

“I’m really proud of you, Shiro,” he says seriously, in his leader voice. Shiro doesn’t think that voice should be as effective on him as it is, since he’s the one who taught it to Keith in the first place. But he feels pleased and kind of bashful nevertheless.

“Thanks, Keith,” he says, covering Keith’s hand with his.

They sit like that, for a minute, under the desert stars, Keith’s hand on Shiro’s shoulder and Shiro’s hand over his, just looking at each other.

Then Keith says, “You wanna go back to base and quit your job?”

“Hell yes,” Shiro says.

And he does.

> I don't know exactly what a prayer is.  
>  I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down  
>  into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,  
>  how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,  
>  which is what I have been doing all day.  
>  Tell me, what else should I have done?  
>  Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?  
>  Tell me, what is it you plan to do  
>  with your one wild and precious life?  
>    
>  -Mary Oliver, [”The Summer Day”](https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-133/the-summer-day/)

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of notes:  
> -It's been a really long time since I was in therapy, so I apologize if the therapy scenes feel really off.  
> -The concept of the Rachean sailing ships was _heavily_ inspired by episode 68 of DS9, where Sisko builds and sails an ancient Bajoran ship.  
> -I only reference Galra clans in the fic itself, but basically I imagine that part of the reason that some Galra look wildly different from each other is that there are a few clans that developed more or less independently of each other on Daibazaal (both like, culturally and evolutionarily). So while Keith has been trying to learn about his Galra heritage, Krolia has been making sure to also teach him about the traditions and history of her clan specifically.
> 
> There's a possibility I will write more in this setting, because I still have Ideas. If that doesn't end up materializing, y'all can imagine a series of vignettes where Keith and Shiro continue to be so in love with each other that all the Galra aboard the Orozeni just Assume they are mates. Probably there are space whales, and space sea shanties, and then, months into their voyage, they finally confess to each other -- almost as an afterthought, because it’s so easy and right between them.


End file.
